Round Ball vs Cut Lead

Oleg posted this on FB and I found it so interesting I had to post it here along with a comment from another user on FB

WR:  Very interesting! I had never heard of the extruded bar bullets. A Confederate infantryman in Missouri described in his journal the practice of casting bullets in a thimble. He said they would pour in the lead, then very quickly jam a pointed stick into the thimble to make the base cavity. He didn't comment on the accuracy, but said they'd shoot clear through a box car at 200 yards!

When we exhumed the remains of 31 Confederate soldiers who died at the battle of Glorieta Pass, in New Mexico, several of the skeletons yielded the bullets that had killed them - everything from buckshot to a 12 pound howitzer canister ball, and several minie bullets. In the pelvic area of one skeleton, we found a .58 minie bullet with the skirts grossly expanded. The expansion was pretty uniform, and the nose of the bullet wasn't deformed, at all, and showed no rifling marks. A few days later in the dig, we found a group of about 15 bullets, identically deformed, in the pelvic area of another skeleton.

The bones didn't show any damage, so we concluded that the bullets had been in the soldier's pockets. The Confederates were pretty poorly armed, even by early war standards, and many of them had shotguns they'd brought from home. They had captured many thousands of rounds of .69 ammunition in paper cartridges at Ft. Bliss, and several mentioned in their letters and journals that a .69 buck and ball round made a 12 gauge shotgun a pretty effective close range assault weapon. (See how I brought in that terminology?)

The flaring of the skirts on those minie bullets baffled us until I took my 12 ga. muzzleloader out of the car and tried one of those bullets in it. It wasn't a tight fit, but was a lot better than a plain .58 bullet. Somehow or another, they were swaging the skirts out to use those bullets in shotguns. (They were too big to fit in an 1842 musket.) I have never tried to fire an altered bullet from my shotgun, but I have tried to swage the skirts of some, and they must have had some kind of home made die, because every method I've tried mangled the nose of the bullet, too.